Electronic systems and circuits have made a significant contribution towards the advancement of modern society and are utilized in a number of applications to achieve advantageous results. Numerous electronic technologies such as digital computers, calculators, audio devices, video equipment, and telephone systems have facilitated increased productivity and reduced costs in analyzing and communicating data, ideas and trends in most areas of business, science, education and entertainment. Electronic systems designed to provide these benefits usually rely upon components such as integrated circuits to operate in an intended manner. The components are usually subjected to various testing procedures to ensure that they are operating correctly and to provide important information about the integrated circuit. However, testing a wide variety of complex component configurations usually consumes valuable resources and time.
Testing activities are usually implemented with numerous objectives associated with a variety of activities. For example, reliably achieving beneficial results usually depends upon device components operating in an intended manner and testing is often utilized to detect design and/or manufacturing errors that can adversely impact reliable proper circuit operations. One type of testing that is very important is characterization testing. Characterization testing is utilized to measure and analyze characteristics or properties of an integrated circuit during operation (e.g., voltage, current, etc.) and the results are typically used to develop models associated with automated design activities. To get an accurate characterization of a circuit, testing is often performed over a period of time in which an multiple measurements are obtained and average is calculated. Conversely, other types of testing such as experimental testing, often provide the most advantageous benefits when there is rapid comparative feedback on the differences between multiple designs. Experimental testing provides important information useful for a variety of endeavors such as optimizing a design and/or component settings. Retrieving an appropriate amount of characterization and/or optimization information typically means testing a wide variety of integrated circuit configurations which usually consumes significant resources.
Traditional testing approaches are usually very expensive and time consuming. For example, traditional integrated circuits are usually custom designed precisely for a narrow range of applications with a fixed combination of required peripheral functionalities and testing each different integrated circuit design with particular fixed peripherals takes a relatively significant amount of time and resources. Separate and dedicated testing operations are usually required for each different integrated circuit. For example, time and resources are expended removing a circuit configured in a first arrangement from a testing system, inserting a circuit configured in a second arrangement in the testing system and providing another set of instructions for testing the second circuit. In addition, the unique aspects of a each dedication circuit make it difficult to determine which testing instructions are best suited for a particular application. Testing procedures for traditional devices that may attempt to provide some limited configuration flexibility are usually further complicated by requirements to track dedicated programming as changes are made when the device is removed from the testing system.
There are potentially numerous different tests that can be run on an integrated circuit and maintaining information and tracking all the possibilities is very difficult. Some traditional attempts at mitigating the difficulty of testing have utilized external computerized testing equipment to try to assist testing of complex circuits. However, these systems depend upon numerous computer programs for each of the different circuit configurations that can be tested and maintaining these programs is usually resource intensive and time consuming.